Tony's dashboard

Tony replied on October 23, 2009 17:57 to the idea "Multitasking fragmentation index" in RescueTime:

This is a really cool idea that we've wanted to do for a WHILE... I think it's probably worth attacking soon. It's pretty hard-- shifting, by itself, isn't necessarily bad. I shift between Photoshop, Coda, and Firefox very rapidly when doing development-- that's how it's supposed to work... So I think we need to track shifting BETWEEN categories (or productivity levels). i.e. rapid/frequent shifting to Facebook = bad. Rapid shifting between a code window and the command line = good.

Tony replied on October 06, 2009 21:59 to the problem "Mac Data collector reports all browsing as "FireFox"" in RescueTime:

Hi Manu-

Firefox is (unfortunately) getting borked from time to time on Mac's. It's an acknowledged bug in Firefox and a restart of the browser should resolve the issue (a reboot shouldn't be required). Still, obviously, sometimes you can't catch the issue until you've lose hours of site time. There's not much help we can offer here except that it doesn't happen with Safari or Chrome. Obviously, you don't want to switch browser on our account.

Assuming you don't, your next best bet is to restart Firefox from time to time and you'll hopefully run into it infrequently. FWIW, I'm using FF on a Mac as well, so I know this frustration pretty well.

Tony replied on October 02, 2009 16:36 to the idea "Extend Focus mode to apps, not just web sites." in RescueTime:

I totally agree-- IM and easy-interrupt communication is pretty evil. This is something we definitely want to do, but it is quite a bit harder than web sites!

Tony replied on October 01, 2009 00:02 to the idea "Ability to add notes to activities" in RescueTime:

That's a cool idea! Presumably these would be temporally sensitive notes-- i.e. you add a note to Photoshop for TODAY, but that note wouldn't necessarily stick to photoshop every time you see it!

We're furiously working on some cool project support that I literally couldn't be more excited about. If you fill out the survey here ( http://rescuetime.wufoo.com/forms/res... ), we'll email you some early screenshots when they are ready.

Tony replied on September 23, 2009 15:47 to the question "Could we focus on FocusTime for a sec?" in RescueTime:

Hi Porter! It's in there (we soft launched it recently)! We're working on making it clearer. Here's a screencast (you're the first non employee to see it!):

http://vimeo.com/6685336

It's available for all premium accounts (and is also something that free accounts can test for 14 days). If your account is already 14 days old, drop me a note at tony@rescuetime and I'll get you a 14-day free trial.

Tony replied on September 18, 2009 17:11 to the question "Does RescueTime recognize dual monitors?" in RescueTime:

RescueTIme pays attention ONLY to which application is "in focus" according to the Operating System. A 2nd monitor (according to RescueTime) is really just more desktop space. So if you were working in Excel on one monitor, all other open applications would not be logging. If you shifted from Excel to Outlook (on your other monitor), Excel would be perceived as "in the background" and would not be logged.

Tony replied on September 15, 2009 21:40 to the question "How do I effectively use RescueTime on two computers side by side?" in RescueTime:

Howdy Merlin! Hrm. I don't have a GREAT answer for that. If you select "none of your business (don't log the time)" it won't log the time. So when you come back to your Mac/PC after perceived idle time (which really wasn't idle-- you were just on your other machine), then you could click that and that time wouldn't be double-entered.

Tony replied on September 11, 2009 16:15 to the problem ""Welcome back" popup doesn't redraw when computer is unlocked." in RescueTime:

Hrm. Can you tell us about your system? OS / version?

Tony replied on September 08, 2009 16:25 to the problem "RescueTime blocks sites scored as "Very productive"." in RescueTime:

Hey there-- We're in the process of tuning this up. The issue (I think) is one I ran into as well. We were doing partial matches on URLs. Example: Time.com is -2 for me, so it makes my block list. Because we're doing partial matches, it also sees "RescueTime.com" as a match and blocks that!

This will be fixed in the release version (which should happen this week).

Sorry for the rough edges-- and we appreciate the bug report!

Tony replied on September 02, 2009 17:54 to the question "Mac Data Collector shuts down under Snow Leopard" in RescueTime:

Hi Fredric- When did you download it? We just pushed a Snow Leopard friendly version of RescueTime this weekend (http://www.rescuetime.com/download )... Are you running that? You can check the version # by clicking on the black plus in your system tray area (near your clock) and selecting preferences. Version # is at the bottom!

We're all Mac folks here, so Mac love is a high priority for us. Please let me know!

Tony replied on September 01, 2009 18:07 to the problem "Reported time for goals is inaccurate" in RescueTime:

Hey martin-
This was a bit of a nightmare to track down/fix, but I believe we've done so. Let me know if you're still seeing this!

Tony replied on August 31, 2009 17:00 to the problem "I'm close to giving up on Rescue Time..." in RescueTime:

Hi Mark-- I'm sorry to hear about that! Here are some thoughts and developments that might change your mind. If not, we do appreciate the feedback and insight you've given us in your tenure as a RescueTime user.

- We believe that default settings are useful for most people, but yeah-- guessing categories and scores sometimes means we're wrong. We're about to do a data push where we scan how people have categorized/scored things and set the defaults accordingly. So our defaults will get better soon. They'll never be perfect, though.

- Overriding scores is easy! If you don't like our default scores, you can head over to your top activities list (for the month, like : https://www.rescuetime.com/browse/act... ) and start rescoring. I bet you could get everything important rescored in just a few minutes. Resetting categories is a little more effort intensive, but I think is a bit less subjective (so we're right more often with our category defaults).

- I think it's important to let go of scoring/categorizing EVERYTHING perfectly. Once you've got good metadata on your top 30 or so things in a given period, you've really covered 98+% of your time.

- There's search! Our indexing has had a few hiccups, but once that's ironed out, you can do searches for a lot of things that you might tag. Searches include scores, category names, app names, etc. So if you miss a tag called "webdev" which included photoshop work and coding work, for example, you could search for "design development" and get a pretty good report on that.

Thanks again for your feedback!

Tony replied on August 26, 2009 19:22 to the question "Slowness in data processing" in RescueTime:

30 minutes is normal for non-premium accounts. Do you have a premium account? If so, there are times where this can happen if our servers are heavily loaded-- but it should be rare. We did have a hiccup this AM, so it might be that our servers are a bit behind schedule.

Tony replied on August 24, 2009 17:38 to the idea "Set a weekly goal that only applies to the workweek" in RescueTime:

Hey Scott- We have weekday goals which do exactly that (they are M-F). We are actually revising goals now and will have goal-by-goal scheduling capabilities as well as voluntary blocking capabilities ("Don't let me go to YouTube from 9a - 5p"!).

Tony replied on August 18, 2009 16:35 to the praise "I'm back, and it feels like home" in RescueTime:

Hey Scott-- the awesome thing about product developers like you is that you know just how powerful comments like this are! Many thanks!

A comment on the idea "Split up Google Reader (google.com/reader) and Google" in RescueTime:

Hey Martin-- this is done! If you're seeing something different, please let us know. We have to set up exceptions in our system to make it work, so perhaps we haven't done your country's version of Google yet. – Tony, on August 14, 2009 15:46

Tony replied on August 07, 2009 16:06 to the question "Lost time due to site/flash web loading?" in RescueTime:

RescueTime doesn't understand/pay attention to loading times, so don't sweat that.

It's not uncommon to have significantly less time logged than your entire work day due to how idle timeouts work.

Here's how it works:

RescueTime constant scans to see what's on top (whether it's a site or an app). If your mouse/keyboard activity stops for 2 minutes, RescueTime stops paying attention (until your mouse moves again). When your mouse moves, we subtract 2 minutes from the previous record.

So, as to why your stuff feels low, it COULD mean:

- You are more hands off than average. A lot of reading, thinking, video can result in idle time that's not entirely idle.

- You use a lot of full-screen apps. RescueTime occasionally has difficultly understanding windows when in fullscreen mode (usually games are the culprit)

- You have bits of idle time sprinkled throughout the day-- phone calls, bathroom breaks, staring at clouds, playing with your rubik's cube, etc.

- RescueTime is borked. Increasingly rare, but software is software and things can go wrong! :-) If you suspect something is, we'd probably need to know about your system and have you do a controlled experiment.

You can look at your "by hour" graph for yesterday and see if there's anything that looks odd:

https://www.rescuetime.com/browse/act...

It's VERY common for the minute logged per hour to be 45-58. It's actually fairly RARE to log a full 60 minutes in an hour.

Tony replied on July 27, 2009 16:37 to the question "Switching to Safari is often very slow with RescueTime" in RescueTime:

Oh, and just to triple check-- can you give me your version # of Safari and what version of OS X you are running? We haven't been able to reproduce this, but would like to try getting as close to your setup as possible.

Tony replied on July 27, 2009 16:36 to the question "Switching to Safari is often very slow with RescueTime" in RescueTime:

How bizarre! We're a Mac shop here and all use Safari quite a bit. Never experienced that (nor have I heard of other Mac peeps experiencing that). Are you running the most recent version of Safari? I'm going to shoot this thread to our lead Mac client developer to see if he has any ideas...

Tony replied on July 23, 2009 23:09 to the question "Switching to Safari is often very slow with RescueTime" in RescueTime:

Is it every time? If so, can you try quitting RescueTime and seeing if the problem resolves? In other words, are you SURE it's RescueTime?

We haven't heard any reports of that and we're also all Safari users here...